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Thanks To E-Commerce, Getting African Music Is As Easy As Getting Car Parts Online

07

Mar

Thanks To E-Commerce, Getting African Music Is As Easy As Getting Car Parts Online

Back when I got started collecting traditional African music, it was very hard to get CDs. It really was. You had to know people. You had to sign up for mailing lists, and I am not talking about online mailing lists here. I am not talking about online platforms, where you just click a button and thousands of people get a link or get information.

We are talking about the bad old days before the internet. Back in those days, when you get on a mailing list, it’s anybody’s guess when you would get notifications. It was very rare that you would get free samples of music because it was just too expensive to send tapes and 45 singles through snail mail.

Well, fast-forward through today, getting traditional African music has never been easier. In fact, thanks to the internet, global musical traditions from the Eskimos, all the way to the African tribes, to South Asian Indian indigenous people, and Southeast Asian boat people, has become so much easier. Geographic isolation is no longer a formidable barrier. As long as the music can be recorded and uploaded in digital form, you can get your hands on it.

That is how easy you can get African music. In fact, this ease is actually just part of the revolution the internet has produced in our lives. Like I mentioned above, it used to be a hassle getting CDs through the mail.

Similarly, it used to be a hassle getting car parts. You have to actually live next to a junkyard and pick your own part. That’s how things used to be, but not anymore. Now, you can buy car parts online. As long as you know what that car part looks like, you can buy that part. You just need to go to the right website, pick out the part, click a few buttons, whip out your credit card, and you’re good to go. Thanks to modern shipping, you don’t even need to wait all that long to get your hands on that brand-new or used part.

Getting car parts nowadays is also free of the hassle of bad pricing. Seriously. You don’t have to worry about getting gouged by the closest part supplier because you don’t have access to other car part distributors. Thanks to the Worldwide Web, you can actually compare auto parts prices not just in terms of make, model, and price but also shipping, delivery time, and warranties. Given this huge flood of information, consumers don’t have to worry about wasting their hard earned money on dealers who are too eager to overprice their wares.
Not only are you able to get automotive parts faster and cheaper, many online auto parts warehouses even have amazing customer service guarantees. They are so focused on getting you to come back again and again, many of there online dealers’ customer service departments are available on a 24/7 basis. Unbelievable! Compare this to the bad old days when you have to actually physically walk into a store to get some questions answered. And even if you were able to get a warm body to talk to, it’s anybody’s guess if they actually know the answers to your car parts questions. Not so today. Seriously. You only need to pick up the phone and dial or send an email and you’ll get your answers soon enough.

This is just one tiny snippet of all the massive sea changes e-commerce has gone through. Whether you enjoy traditional African music in digital form, through a CD, or some sort of hard media, buying it is no longer a hassle. In fact, it’s not even hard.

So if you think that there is some sort of difficulty in buying music, think again. It’s just as easy as buying car parts online, medical parts online, or any other niche product. You just have to look, and thanks to modern search engines, it doesn’t take much effort to look.